Tag Archives: Pentagon

Tony Capaccio (@acapaccio), Bloomberg. The Government Accountability Office released a sort of “no kidding, really?” report last week that found after careful analysis that many of the budget cuts the Pentagon is making today to meet sequester guidelines will mean that weapons may cost more later or be delayed. The report looked at how the first year of sequester cuts weren’t as disastrous as originally predicted as defense department leaders drained contracts of padded buckets, delayed development and testing of some systems, and made other short term gain decisions that won’t be as readily available in the second year of cuts. All of…

Andrew Zajac, Bloomberg. Falls Church, Virginia based USIS can’t get much of a break from the relentless scrutiny of its business practices after the revelations that its investigators had conducted the background checks on former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis. The company that processes an astounding two-thirds of all contracted background investigations and half of all U.S. background checks is being accused of submitting investigations to the Office of Personnel Management without proper quality control checks. The formerly sealed lawsuit filed by a former investigator as part of the federal whistle-blower legislation act was joined by the…

Gordon Adams, Foreign Policy. The shutdown is over, at least for now, and reality is settling back on the defense establishment. That reality is that the chance of the sequestration defense cuts being lifted is almost zero at this point. We have said for some time that the odd bedfellows that the cuts have made mean it is almost impossible in this political environment. The fight over Obamacare is more important to Tea Party conservatives who are proud of the fact that the federal budget has actually declined for the first time in years. For liberals, protecting benefits programs means they have no…

John Grady, ScoutComms. The battle of the government shutdown has been virtually the only story this week. Over the weekend, the Department of Defense announced their intention to bring most of the thousands of furloughed employees back to work. The move is a result of the Pay Our Military Act which Congress passed thinking it would be cover to avoid criticism for leaving troops in combat unpaid. Fortunately not all of the government lawyers got laid off last week and DoD partnered with DoJ to discover that nearly every single employee “supports military operations” and they…

John T. Bennett (@BennettJohnT), Defense News. Last Wednesday found the leaders of all four military services before the House Armed Services Committee testifying on the effects of continued sequester budget cuts. The testimony was peppered with colorful words like ‘insidious’, ‘bleak’, ‘difficult’, and ‘devastating’. The news reports that came out almost immediately offered the grim news that all four services are saying they may not be able to even fight one Major Theater Operation if sequester cuts are allowed to continue into 2014 with only the Marines saying they could but with major caveats. For perspective, the rule has always been…